Access to public land? There’s an app for that
CHEYENNE, WY – You can use smartphone apps to vacuum your home, order a meal and track your sleep. Now, you can also get access to private or public land for your next hunting, fishing or birdwatching adventure.
Wyomingite Sam Seeton launched Infinite Outdoors, an app whose users pay for permission to hunt and fish on private land, in 2020. Now, the company has a new initiative, Access Granted, that allows users to request permission to cross private property in order to enter “landlocked” public lands — public lands that are inaccessible due to being surrounded by private lands.
About 15.87 million acres of state and federal public land in the West are landlocked, according to an analysis by digital mapping company onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP). Those areas include thousands of acres of mule deer habitat in Arizona’s Dragoon and Chiricahua mountains; thousands more acres of Montana state trust lands, stretching from the Little Belt Mountains to the Judith River, that are known for elk, antelope and bird hunting; checkerboarded national forest land in Nevada’s Humboldt Mountains; and isolated Bureau of Land Management parcels along the Wyoming-Montana border in the Powder River Basin.
“We need to unlock public land in a variety of ways, because there’s not a single silver bullet,” said Joel Webster, chief conservation officer at TRCP. “If a private company is willing to take the steps … then good on them.”
Infinite Outdoors’ users pay nothing to arrange permission to cross private lands, Seton said; the company itself, along with hunting gear companies like Primos and Hush, compensates the landowners, calculating rates with formulas based on use and demand. Hunters get access, landowners get extra cash, brands get promotion, and Infinite Outdoors gets customers, some of whom might be willing to shell out $50/year for the app’s premium version, which allows them to book overnight stays on private land.
Landowners who use the app to offer passage across their lands agree to grant access for at least half of each year and half of every major hunting season. Access Granted calculated that during the first month of the service, users were able to reach 60 square miles of otherwise inaccessible public land in Colorado and Wyoming. “We’re pretty happy with that, but by no means satisfied,” Seeton said in June. “The goal is to get it across all the Western states.” (Properties on Access Granted do not offer permission or charge for corner crossing.)
A similar venture called the LandTrust app allows hunters and other recreationists to access private property for a fee. When company founder and CEO Nic De Castro moved to Bozeman, Montana, in 2016, he wanted to hunt and fish on private land, but there were few options available. “I just thought, this is a clear marketplace issue,” De Castro said. “There’s tons of supply and there’s tons of demand.” But in many cases, he found that private land was inaccessible unless “you’re born into it, you marry into it, you buy it, you lease it, or you go knock on doors. Most of those are very expensive. And the last one, I would say, is not super effective.”
“There’s tons of supply and there’s tons of demand.”
Today, LandTrust’s users can book time on roughly 1.5 million acres across over 40 states. Most listings offer hunting; some offer horseback riding or camping. Landowners set their own prices, and LandTrust collects a 20% commission.
Both apps offer services similar to state initiatives such as Montana’s Block Management program, which establishes public-access agreements with private landowners. Alex Leone, the executive director of the Public Land Water Access Association, worries that the apps disincentivize participation in these public programs, which cost users less but also pay the landowners less. “We’re seeing a lot less incentive for traditional producers to enter into the block management model, and some of the pressure you’re seeing is directly coming from … those other apps,” Leone said.
De Castro doesn’t think LandTrust competes with state programs. “I think access is a spectrum, and there’s multiple avenues for it,” he said. Seeton said that landowners like the flexibility of Infinite Outdoors’ access agreements compared to long-term easements or state access initiatives. “The landowner still has some control,” he said.
“I think landowners are trying to make a living, and like it or not, hunting-access monetization is part of that,” Webster agreed. “What it does is require that states continue to improve their programs so they continue to be attractive to landowners.”
Another concern is that the apps have not always fact-checked property descriptions, which means that less-scrupulous landowners can misrepresent what they’re selling. “Think of this as public land hunting on private land,” is how one Infinite Outdoors property offers shared access to pronghorn hunting in Colorado. And in Montana, where all streams and rivers are public up to the high-water mark, Leone worries that landowners with riverfront property could advertise — and collect fees for — “private” fishing in what are actually public waters.
At least one has already done so: A 2,300-acre ranch property on the Upper Clark Fork River in Montana advertised three locations on the fishing access site RareWaters, each for $175 per day, without mentioning the existing Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks easement that allows the public to access the floodplain for free without landowner permission. (Infinite Outdoors recently acquired RareWaters, and the company’s chief marketing officer, Michael Maroney, told High Country News that it would not be relisting the property or others like it.) Ultimately, the burden falls on access-app users to know what they’re actually paying for — and whether they need to pay for it at all.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
Photo illustration image credits: Bureau of Land Management.
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
